“We think we may have found the answer. Increased circulation in the Southern Ocean allowed carbon dioxide to leak into the atmosphere, working to warm the planet,” said Princeton University’s Professor Daniel Sigman, co-author of the study. For years, researchers have known that growth and sinking of phytoplankton pumps carbon dioxide deep into the ocean, a process often referred to as the ‘biological pump.’ “The biological pump is driven mostly by the low latitude ocean but is undone closer to the poles, where carbon dioxide is vented back to the atmosphere by the rapid exposure of deep waters to the...

It had been thought that aftershocks — smaller magnitude quakes that occur in the same region as the initial quake as the surrounding crust adjusts after the fault perturbation — were the only seismic activity an earthquake could lead to. But the team’s analysis of seismic data from 1973 through 2016 provided the first discernible evidence that in the three days following one large quake, other earthquakes were more likely to occur. Each test case in the study represented a single three-day window ‘injected’ with a large-magnitude (6.5 or greater) earthquake suspected of inducing other quakes, and accompanying each case...

...But Keller doesn’t buy any of it. “It’s like a fairy tale: ‘Big rock from sky hits the dinosaurs, and boom they go.’ And it has all the aspects of a really nice story,” she said. “It’s just not true.” ...Keller’s resistance has put her at the core of one of the most rancorous and longest-running controversies in science. “It’s like the Thirty Years’ War,” says Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Impacters’ case-closed confidence belies decades of vicious infighting, with the two sides trading accusations of slander, sabotage, threats, discrimination, spurious data, and...

NASA’s Galileo spacecraft surprised scientists when it revealed that Jupiter’s moon Ganymede generated its own magnetic field. But new research shows Ganymede also creates incredibly powerful waves that rocket particles to enormous energies. Scientists revealed these huge electromagnetic waves while studying old data from Galileo, which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. The observations show another wild way that a moon can interact with the magnetic field of its planet. Jupiter’s radius is around 11 times that of Earth, but it is perhaps 20,000 times more magnetic. This generates an intense radiation environment around the planet. Typically, these waves around...

It's like the underside of the island got a good roasting in the distant past and still has the big scar to prove it. That hotspot, by the way, is the one which today is building Iceland in the middle of the North Atlantic. The plume of broiling rock rising from deep inside the Earth has broken through the thin ocean floor at Iceland's location and is now creating new land with regular eruptions of lava. Greenland's warm NW-SE band is reported by a team of researchers led by the US space agency (Nasa) and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS)....

A meteor hit Earth and exploded with 2.1 kilotons of force in July, but the Air Force has made no mention of the event. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed an object of unspecified size traveling at 15.1 miles per second (54,360 miles per hour) struck the ground in Greenland, just 27 miles north of Thule Air Base, on July 25. The base is mainly used to detect missile launches. Director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists Hans Kristensen tweeted about the impact, but the US Air Force has not reported the event. Kristensen argues it’s...

July 28, 2018Earth, Environment Scientists Predict Mass Extinction Could Be Triggered By 2100 by Ben Renner BOSTON — Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) predict that by 2100, the earth’s oceans will contain so much carbon that a sixth mass extinction will begin. “This is not saying that disaster occurs the next day,” explains Daniel Rothman, a professor of geophysics in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, about his recent study in a media release. “It’s saying that, if left unchecked, the carbon cycle would move into a realm which would be no longer stable,...

The Air Force said Friday that there was no damage to Thule Air Base in Greenland after a large meteor fell nearby last week. The fireball incident occurred just miles from the remote military base on July 25 and entered the atmosphere with a 2.1 kiloton force, according to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. The Air Force 21st Space Wing monitors missile launches and space activity via sensors at Thule, and directed any questions to NASA, which did not immediately provide a statement.

A meteor hit the earth and exploded with 2.1 kilotons of force last month, but the US Air Force has made no mention of the event. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed an object of unspecified size travelling at 24.4 kilometres per second struck earth in Greenland, just 43 kilometres north of an early missile warning Thule Air Base on the 25th of July, 2018. Director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists, Hans Kristensen, tweeted about the impact, but America’s Air Force has not reported the event.Mr. Kristensen argues it’s concerning there was no public warning...

Fiery chunks of rock are constantly bombarding the planetary bodies of our solar system, leaving behind long-lasting scars. These gouges, in the form of craters, can be used to learn about the history of our little nook in the vast universe, prompting scientists to study their features feverishly. Yet one pattern commonly found around craters has remained a puzzle. Sometimes, these craters contain radial rays of debris fanned out around the impact zone. In the lab, scientists have tried to reproduce these patterns by dropping balls into containers of sand or beads, yet have found little success. But in a...

"In this research, there was no evidence of heat coming directly up from the Earth's core to power the surface volcano at Yellowstone," Zhou said. "Instead, the underground images we captured suggest that Yellowstone volcanoes were produced by a gigantic ancient oceanic plate that dove under the Western United States about 30 million years ago. This ancient oceanic plate broke into pieces, resulting in perturbations of unusual rocks in the mantle which led to volcanic eruptions in the past 16 million years."..." "This evidence was in direct contradiction to the plume model," Zhou said. In her study, Zhou found the...

SOLAR MINIMUM DEEPENS: The sun has been without sunspots for 32 of the past 33 days. To find a similar stretch of blank suns, you have to go back to 2009 when the sun was experiencing the deepest solar minimum in a century. Solar minimum has returned, bringing extra cosmic rays, long-lasting holes in the sun's atmosphere, and strangely pink auroras. ATMOSPHERIC RADIATION UPDATE: As the sunspot cycle declines, we expect cosmic rays to increase. Is this actually happening? The answer is "yes." Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus have been monitoring cosmic radiation in the atmosphere...

Scientists have taken much better stock of our neck of the cosmic woods over the past two decades, as a new NASA video makes clear. The animation maps out all known near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) -- space rocks that get within about 30 million miles (50 million kilometers) of our planet's orbit -- from 1999 through January 2018, in roughly 10-year time steps. The differences are stark. In 1999, identified NEAs speckled the inner solar system thinly, in a light dusting. Many more were discovered by 2009, and Earth's neighborhood looks absolutely swamped in the present-day portion of the video. But...

Military equipment has been unearthed in the ancient city of Sardis in the western province of Manisa's Salihli district. Officials believe they might have been used in an ancient war between the Lydians and the Persians. The ancient city of Sardis, which was the capital of the Lydian Kingdom in the ancient ages and had been home to many civilizations from seventh B.C. to seventh A.D., is now undergoing excavation works. This year's works continue in an area called the "Palace" region... The military equipment is believed to have been used in the war that caused the end of the...

The Milky Way had a previously unknown big sibling that was torn apart by the neighboring Andromeda galaxy long ago, a new study suggests. Andromeda and the Milky Way are the two largest members of the Local Group, a collection of more than 50 galaxies packed into a dumbbell-shaped region of space about 10 million light-years across. Andromeda was not kind to the onetime third-biggest member of this family, devouring it about 2 billion years ago, according to the new research. "Astronomers have been studying the Local Group — the Milky Way, Andromeda and their companions — for so long,"...

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) and ESA (European space agency) teamed up to produce a packed Asteroid Day webcast. There were interviews with ESA and ESO scientists. Updates from Europe’s asteroid hunters and some of the most recent asteroid science results, including the blockbuster news on Oumuamua, the first-ever interplanetary visitor. The programme also included an interview with ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano on the challenges of future human missions to asteroids, as well as a surprise segment that answered the age-old question: What really killed off the dinosaurs? More than 1M asteroids have the potential to impact Earth and through...

Mike Poland, the lead scientist for the Yellowstone Observatory joins the show to discuss the most recent changes at Yellowstone and to discuss the chances and signs of a catastrophic eruption. Mike's bio and wensite can be found at the following link: https://www.usgs.gov/staff-profiles/michael-poland?qt-staff_profile_science_products=3#qt-staff_profile_science_products

The Meghalayan...runs from 4,200 years ago to the present. It began with a destructive drought, whose effects lasted two centuries, and severely disrupted civilisations in Egypt, Greece, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Yangtze River Valley. The Meghalayan Age is unique among the many intervals of the geologic timescale in that its beginning coincides with a global cultural event produced by a global climatic event... The middle phase of the Holocene will be referred to as the Northgrippian, and runs from 8,300 years ago up to the start of the Meghalayan. The onset for this age was an...

In March 2017, Jupiter was in the perfect location to be observed using the Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, which has the Dark Energy Camera and can survey the sky for faint objects. Astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science and his team were using the telescope to search the edge of the solar system for signs of Planet Nine. They realized they could observe Jupiter at the same time. They would be able to tell the difference between Jupiter and the objects around it versus the distant solar system objects because any...

A team of scientists made an enormous discovery when they recently uncovered a "quadrillion" tons of diamonds,buried more than 100 miles below Earth's surface, according to a new study Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, the Carnegie Institution of Washington and several other universities used seismic devices to measure the speed of sound waves traveling through the Earth's crust. "Sound waves move at various speeds through the Earth, depending on the temperature, density, and composition of the rocks through which they travel," MIT explained in a news release. "Scientists have used this relationship between seismic velocity and...